Headsets of various types are commonly used for telephone or radio communication. With reference to FIG. 1 a conventional headset system 10 shown, including a headband 12 on which is mounted a speaker assembly 14 located near the user's ear. A boom 16 is connected to the speaker assembly 14 to carry sound from the user's mouth to a microphone, not shown, which is located near the speaker assembly 14. An alternative form of a conventional headset is shown in FIG. 2, which includes an over the ear connector 20 which enables the user to mount the connector 20 to the ear. Both types of headsets can send and receive signals using wires connected to a source such as a telephone, or they can send and receive signals without wires via a small radio receiver/transmitter.
Contemporary headset design demands that a headset be compact and discreet. In a headset, the spacing between the end of the boom and the user's mouth influences the quality of the audio signal received by the microphone and therefore the quality of the signal transduced by the microphone and the electronic signal transmitted by the microphone. Normally, if the end of the boom is closer to the user's mouth a higher quality signal can be produced by the microphone than if the end of the boom is far away. Also, a noisy environment can adversely affect the ability of the microphone to transduce and transmit an accurate rendition of the voice of the user. Therefore, to communicate well in the presence of background noise the distal end of the boom must be located relatively near the user's mouth, which can result in the boom being long so that the style is not ideal.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a headset with improved noise cancelling abilities and which meets today's aesthetic design requirements.